In Harper Lee’s Novels, a Loss of Innocence as Children and Again as Adults

Harper Lee will forever be remembered for her 1960 classic “To Kill a Mockingbird” — a novel that became a staple of middle-school curriculums, and for several generations of readers, a coming-of-age story that spoke to their own losses of childhood innocence.

As embodied by Gregory Peck in the movie adaptation, Atticus Finch was an iconic hero: not only a devoted father to his two motherless children Scout and Jem, but also a symbol of decency, compassion and honor. Fans named their children after him, or went to law school because they admired his idealistic determination to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in the Depression-era South. More skeptical readers and moviegoers detected something patronizing in a liberal white lawyer riding to the rescue of a poor, uneducated black man who was cast in the role of innocent, but passive, victim.

Debates over “Mockingbird” took off last summer with the publication of an early version of that novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” in which Atticus, shockingly, emerges as a bigot and segregationist. The publication of “Watchman” — in the midst of debates over police violence, the Confederate battle flag and the Black Lives Matter movement — was also a reminder of how closely associated “Mockingbird” was, in many older readers’ minds, with the civil rights movement of the 1960s and how it had become part of the national dialogue about race and justice.

Does the publication of “Watchman” alter how we read “Mockingbird”? Does it alter Ms. Lee’s legacy and reputation as a writer? Ms. Lee’s two novels both concern the loss of illusions, and public reaction to her books provide a window on America’s slow, stumbling efforts to grapple with racial inequality. They also raise important questions about the dynamic between fiction and history, and how we assess works of art from earlier eras — whether by the standards of the times in which they were written or through the prism of our values today.

Whereas “Mockingbird” was set in the 1930s and was seen through the eyes of Scout as a girl (she is almost 6 when that novel begins), “Watchman” takes place in the 1950s around the time of the Brown v. Board of Education decision and depicts an adult Scout’s dismay when she returns to Alabama from New York City for a visit and is forced to reckon with her father’s ugly views on race. Readers of “Mockingbird,” who remembered Atticus as an idealistic progressive, could not help but share Scout’s trauma: We, too, were shocked and dismayed to learn that Atticus was first conceived as an opponent of integration, who said things like “the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people” and asks Scout if she wants “Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters?”

Different as the two novels are, they both attest to Ms. Lee’s professed ambition to be “the Jane Austen of South Alabama” — her eye for small, telling details; her ear for small-town chatter (and the emotional subtext beneath), and her natural storytelling instincts. “Mockingbird” reflects the astute advice of Ms. Lee’s editor to move the story back two decades and to focus on Scout’s girlhood. And it’s a more polished and mature performance: The language is looser and more poetic, and the crucial decision to make Scout the narrator results in a voice that possesses both immediacy and retrospective wisdom, evoking, in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s words, the universal “mysteries of childhood.” Compared with the movie version, “Mockingbird” the novel spends less time on the trial of Tom Robinson and more on conjuring the day-to-day rhythms of small-town life — in ways more reminiscent of Austen or Barbara Pym than many of Ms. Lee’s fellow Southern writers. It captures the intertwined relationships of residents in this hermetic world, as seen from the unfiltered point of view of a feisty and precocious girl — easily one of the most memorable children in contemporary American literature.

The destruction of innocence (symbolized in the first book by the mockingbird and its two innocent characters, the falsely accused Tom Robinson, and the ostracized neighbor Boo Radley) is the central theme running through both Ms. Lee’s novels. In “Mockingbird,” Scout and her older brother Jem are disillusioned, as children, to learn that it’s difficult, if not impossible, for a black man to receive a fair trial, despite their father’s best efforts as a defense lawyer. In “Watchman,” a grown-up Scout is sickened by the bigotry of her father, who once attended a Klan meeting and holds deeply segregationist views.

Instead of standing up to the ignorant bigots in town, the Atticus in “Watchman” shares many of their worst prejudices. And the town of Maycomb, Ala., in “Watchman” is depicted in considerably rawer, more alarming terms, too — as a community peopled with vicious haters who employ the ugliest, most racist language; and small-minded provincials, driven by feelings of superiority and privilege.

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Harper Lee and Truman Capote in 1960.CreditThe Truman Capote Literary Trust, via New York Public Library

So, somewhere along the way, Harper Lee’s approach toward her material — and the Atticus figure, in particular — changed. From an indictment of the small-town South, she moved toward what she called “a plea for something,” a reminder to “people at home” of their humanity and the need for empathy for all people, no matter their color.

For some readers, these changes meant that Ms. Lee had whitewashed the past in “Mockingbird,” creating a phony, idealized portrait of the small-town South that suggested racism was largely confined to a few ignorant haters. Other readers continue to cherish the redemptive elements in “Mockingbird” and regard the differences between the books as a fascinating case study in the mysteries of rewriting and an author finding her groove (with a big assist from an editor): how a lumpy fable about a young woman’s grief over her discovery of her father’s bigoted views evolved into a classic coming-of-age story and the tale of a fight for justice.

The differences between the two books also underscore the effect that time has on how stories are told — and read. Depicting the sorry state of civil rights during the Depression, “Mockingbird” both allowed readers in the 1960s to congratulate themselves on how far race relations had progressed and gave members of the civil rights movement a sense, as Andrew Young once put it, of an “emerging humanism and decency.”

“Watchman,” in contrast, was both set in the 1950s and written then, and it underscored just how horrific race relations and social justice were. Read now, it even shows the novel’s heroine, the idealistic Scout, as a captive of her time, telling her father that she knows change and equality have “got to be slow.”

In such respects, Ms. Lee has given us, in her two published novels, documents that allow us to measure how times and attitudes about race have changed, and — given continuing injustices today — how terribly far we have yet to go.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: The Loss of Innocence, First as Children, Then Again as Adults. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe